by Tom Clancy
He was in a sour mood this evening, and he needed to shake it off before he hit the stage. He hadn’t talked to his son, Jack Junior, in weeks—just a couple of short-and-sweet e-mails. This happened from time to time; Ryan Sr. knew he wasn’t exactly the easiest person to get in touch with while on the campaign trail. But his wife, Cathy, had mentioned just minutes before that Jack hadn’t been able to get away from work to meet up with her in Baltimore that afternoon, and that worried him a little.
Though there was nothing unusual about parents wanting to stay in touch with their adult child, the presidential candidate and his wife had added reason for concern because they both knew what their son did for a living. Well, Jack Sr. thought to himself, he knew what his son did, more or less, and his wife knew … to an extent. Several months back, Sr. and Jr. had sat Cathy down with high hopes of explaining. They’d planned on laying out Jack Junior’s occupation as an analyst and operative for an “off-the-books” spy agency formed by Sr. himself and helmed by former senator Gerry Hendley. The conversation had started off well enough, but the two men began equivocating under the powerful gaze of Dr. Cathy Ryan, and in the end they’d stammered out something about clandestine intelligence analysis that made it sound as if Jack Junior spent his days with his elbows propped on a desk reading computer files looking for ne’er-do-well financiers and money launderers, work that would expose him to no more danger than carpal tunnel syndrome and paper cuts.
If only that were the truth, Jack Sr. thought to himself as a fresh wash of stomach acid burned into his gut.
No, the conversation with his wife had not gone particularly well, Jack Sr. admitted to himself afterward. He’d broached the subject a couple of times since. He hoped he’d been able to peel back another layer of the onion for Cathy; just maybe she was beginning to get the idea that her son was involved in some real intelligence fieldwork, but again, Ryan Sr. had just made it sound like Ryan Jr. occasionally traveled to European capitals, dined with politicians and bureaucrats, and then wrote reports about their conversations on his laptop while sipping burgundy and watching CNN.
Oh, well, thought Jack. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. And if she did know? Jesus. With Kyle and Katie still at home, she had enough on her plate without having to also worry about her twenty-six-year-old son, didn’t she?
Jack Sr. told himself that worrying about Jack Junior’s profession would be his burden, not Cathy’s, and it was a burden that he had to shake off for the time being.
He had an election to win.
Ryan’s mood brightened a little. Things were looking good for his campaign. The latest Pew poll had Ryan up by thirteen percent; Gallup was right there at plus eleven. The networks had done their own polling, and all three were slightly lower, probably due to some selection bias that his campaign manager, Arnold van Damm, and his people had not bothered to research yet because Ryan was so far ahead.
The electoral college race was tighter, Jack knew, but it always was. He and Arnie both felt he needed a good showing in the next debate to keep some momentum for the home stretch of the campaign, or at least until the last debate. Most races tighten up in the final month or so. Pollsters call it the Labor Day spread, as the narrowing in the polls usually begins around Labor Day and continues on until Election Day on the first Tuesday in November.
Statisticians and pundits differ on the reasons for this phenomenon. Was it that likely voters who had switched sides were now getting cold feet and returning to their original candidate? Could there be more independent thinking in the summer than there was in November, now closer to the time when answering a pollster’s questions had actual consequences? Was it the near wall-to-wall news coverage on the frontrunner as Election Day approached that tended to highlight more gaffes for the leading candidate?
Ryan tended to agree with Arnie on the subject, as there were few people on earth who knew more about matters related to campaigns and elections than Arnie van Damm. Arnie explained it away as simple math. The candidate leading the race had more people polling in his favor than the candidate trailing. Therefore, if ten percent of both voters shifted allegiance in the last month of a race, the candidate with more initial voters would lose more votes.
Simple math, Ryan suspected, nothing more. But simple math would not keep the talking heads on television talking or the twenty-four/seven political blogs blogging, so theories and conspiracies were ginned up by America’s bloviating class.
Ryan put down his water bottle, grabbed his coat and slipped it on, then headed for the door. He felt a little better, but anxiety about his son kept his stomach churning.
Hopefully, thought Ryan, Jack Junior was just out tonight enjoying himself, maybe on a date with someone special.
Yeah, Senior said to himself. Surely that’s all.
Twenty-six-year-old Jack Ryan Jr. sensed movement on his right, and he spun away from it, twisted his body clear of the knife’s blade as it made to plunge into his chest. As he continued his rotation he brought up his left forearm, knocked his attacker’s hand away as he grabbed the man’s wrist with his right hand. Then Ryan heaved his body forward, into his attacker’s chest, and this sent the man tumbling backward toward the floor.
Jack immediately went for his gun, but the falling man took hold of Ryan’s shirt and brought Ryan down with him. Jack Junior lost the space he’d created from his enemy that he needed to draw his pistol from his inside-the-waistband holster, and now, as they crashed to the floor together, he knew the opportunity was lost.
He’d just have to fight this battle hand to hand.
The attacker went for Jack’s throat, fingernails digging into his skin, and again Jack had to knock away the threat with a violent arm sweep. The assailant flipped from a sitting position to his knees, and then hopped up again to his feet. Ryan was below him now, and vulnerable. With no other options, Jack went for his pistol, but he had to roll onto his left hip to free the weapon from its holster.
In the time it took to execute this move, his attacker had pulled his own gun from the small of his back, and he shot Ryan five times in the chest.
Pain stitched across Jack’s body with the impact of the projectiles.
“Dammit!” he yelled.
Ryan was shouting at the pain, yes. But more than this, he was shouting with the frustration of losing the fight.
Again.
Ryan ripped the goggles off his eyes and sat up. A hand came down to assist him, and he took it, regained his feet, and reholstered his weapon—an Airsoft version of the Glock 19 that used compressed air to fire plastic projectiles that stung like hell but did not injure.
His “attacker” took off his own eye protection and then retrieved the rubber knife from the floor. “Sorry about the scratches, old boy,” the man said, his Welsh accent obvious, even buried as it was behind his heavy breathing.
Jack wasn’t paying attention. “Too slow!” he shouted at himself, his adrenaline from the hand-to-hand melee mixing with his frustration.
But the Welshman, in stark contrast to his American student, was calm, as if he’d just stood after sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons. “No worries. Go tend to your wounds and come back so I can tell you what you did wrong.”
Ryan shook his head. “Tell me now.” He was mad at himself; the cuts on his neck, as well as the scrapes and bruises all over his body, were the least of his concerns.
James Buck wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his brow and nodded. “All right. First, your assumption is off. There is nothing wrong with your reflexes, which is what you are talking about when you say you are too slow. Your speed of action is good. Better than good, actually. Your body can move as quick as you please, and your dexterity and agility and athleticism are quite impressive. But the trouble, lad, is your speed of thought. You are hesitant, unsure. You are thinking about your next move when you need to be full-tilt action. You are giving off subtle little clues with your thoughts, and you are broadcasting your next move in advance.”
>
Ryan cocked his head, and sweat dripped from his face. He said, “Can you give me an example?”
“Yes. Look at this last engagement. Your body language did you in. Your hand twitched toward your hip twice during the fray. Your gun was well hidden in your waistband and under your shirt, but you revealed its existence by thinking about drawing it and then changing your mind. If your assailant didn’t know you had a gun, he would have just fallen to the ground and climbed back up. But I already knew about the gun because you ‘told’ me about it with your actions. So when I started to fall back, I knew to pull you down with me so you wouldn’t get the space you needed to draw. Make sense?”
Ryan sighed. It did make sense, though, in actuality, James Buck knew about the pistol under Ryan’s T-shirt because James Buck had given it to Ryan before the exercise. Still, Jack conceded, an incredibly savvy enemy could possibly discern Ryan’s thinking about making a play for a hidden weapon on his hip.
Shit, Ryan thought. His enemy would have to be almost psychic to pick up that tell. But that’s why Ryan had been spending the vast majority of his nights and weekends with trainers hired by The Campus. To learn how to tackle the incredibly savvy enemies.
James Buck was ex-SAS and ex-Rainbow, a hand-to-hand and bladed-weapons expert, among other cruel specialties. He’d been hired by the director of The Campus, Gerry Hendley, to work with Ryan on his martial skills.
A year earlier, Ryan had told Gerry Hendley that he wanted more fieldwork to go along with his analytical role at The Campus. He’d gotten more fieldwork, almost more than he’d bargained for, and he’d done well, but he did not have the same level of training as the other operators in his organization.
He knew it and Hendley knew it, and they also knew their options for training were somewhat limited. The Campus did not officially exist, it did not belong to the U.S. government, so any formal training by FBI, CIA, or the military was absolutely out of the question.
So Jack and Gerry and Sam Granger, The Campus’s chief of operations, decided to seek other avenues of instruction. They went to the veterans in The Campus’s stable of operators, John Clark and Domingo Chavez, and they sketched out a plan for young Ryan, a training regimen for him to undergo in his off-hours over the next year or more.
And all this hard work had paid off. Jack Junior was a better operator for all the training he’d undergone, even if the training itself was humbling. Buck, and others like him, had been doing this all their adult lives, and their expertise showed. Ryan was improving, no question, but improving against men like James Buck did not mean defeating them, it merely meant “dying” less often and forcing Buck and the others to work harder in order to defeat him.
Buck must have seen the frustration on Ryan’s face, because he patted him on the shoulder, a gesture of understanding. The Welshman could be vicious and cruel at times, but on other occasions he was fatherly, even friendly. Jack didn’t know which of the two personalities was the “put-on,” or if they were both necessary aspects of his training, a sort of carrot-and-stick approach. “Chin up, old boy,” Buck said. “Heaps better than when you started. You’ve got the physical assets you need to handle yourself, and you’ve got the smarts to learn. We just have to keep working on you, continue to build on your technical proficiency and mind-set. You’re already a sharper tack than ninety-nine percent of the blokes out there. But that one percent remaining are right bastards, so let’s keep at it until we have you ready for them, all right?”
Jack nodded. Humility was not his strong suit, but learning and improving was. He was smart enough to know that James Buck was right, even though Jack wasn’t crazy about the prospect of getting his ass kicked a few thousand more times in pursuit of excellence.
Jack put his eye protection back on. James Buck smacked the side of Ryan’s head with his open hand playfully. “That’s it, lad. You ready to go again?”
Jack nodded again, this time more emphatically. “Hell, yes.”
4
Under the heat of the midday Egyptian sunshine, Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili market overflowed with lunchtime diners and bargain shoppers. Food vendors grilled meat, and the heavy aroma wafted through the air; it mixed with the other smells as coffeehouses vented the scents of their brewed beans and the smoke from their hookah pipes out into the narrow winding alleyways that made up a warren of shops and tent stalls. The streets, alleys, and narrow covered passageways of the marketplace wrapped around the mosques and the stairways and sandstone walls of ancient buildings, and sprawled across a wide portion of the Old City.
This souk had begun its life in the fourteenth century as a caravanserai, an open courtyard that served as an inn for caravans passing through Cairo on the Silk Road. Now the ancient and the modern mixed together in a dizzying display in the Khan el-Khalili. Salespeople haggled in the middle of the narrow thoroughfares dressed in salwar kameez alongside other shopkeepers decked out in jeans and T-shirts. The thin tinny beats of Egyptian traditional music spilled out of cafés and coffeehouses and mixed with the techno music that blared from sales bays of stereo and computer vendors, creating a melody like that of a buzzing insect, save for the clay and goat-skinned drums and synthesized backbeats.
Vendors sold everything from handmade silver and copper wares and jewelry and rugs to flypaper, rubber sandals, and “I ♥ Egypt” T-shirts.
The crowd shifting through the alleys were young and old, black and white, Arab, Western, and Asian. A group of three Middle Eastern men strolled through the market, a portly silver-haired man in the center and two younger muse Ocular men flanking him. Their pace was leisurely and relaxed. They did not stand out, but anyone in the market who paid attention to them for any length of time might well notice that their eyes shifted left and right more than those of the other shoppers. Occasionally, one of the younger men glanced back over his shoulder as they walked.
Just then, the man on the right turned quickly and checked the crowd in the alley behind. He took his time looking at the faces and hands and mannerisms of everyone in sight. After more than ten seconds, the muscular Middle Easterner finished his six-o’clock scan, turned back around, and picked up his pace so he could catch up with the others.
“Just three best buddies out for a lunchtime stroll.” The transmission came through a small, nearly invisible earpiece secreted in the right ear of a man twenty-five meters behind the three Middle Easterners, a Western male in dirty blue jeans and a loose-fitting blue linen shirt who stood outside a restaurant, pretending to read the handwritten French menu posted by the door. He was American, thirtyish, with short dark hair and a scruffy beard. Upon hearing the radio transmission, he looked away from the menu, past the three men in front of him, and ahead into a dusty archway that led away from the souk. There, so deep in the cool shadows that he was only a dark form, a man leaned against a sandstone wall.
The young American brought the cuff of his blue linen shirt to his mouth as he swatted an imaginary fly from his face. He spoke into a small microphone secreted there. “You said it. Goddamned pillars of the community. Nothing to see here.”
The man skulking in the shadows pushed away from the wall, began strolling toward the alley and the three Middle Easterners, who were now just passing in front of him. As he walked he brought his hand to his face. In a second broadcast received in his earpiece, the American in the blue linen shirt heard, “Okay, Dom, I’ve got ’em. Shift one road over, overlap the target, and move up to the next choke point. I’ll update you if he stops.”
“He’s all yours, Sam,” Dominic Caruso said as he turned left, departing the alley via a side passageway that led up a staircase that emptied out on al-Badistand Road. Once he hit the larger street, Dom turned right and moved quickly through pedestrians and bicycles and motorized rickshaws as he maneuvered to get ahead of his target.
Dominic Caruso was young, fit, and relatively dark-complexioned. All these traits had served him in these past few days of surveillance here in Cairo. The latter, his s
kin and hair color, helped him blend in with a population that was predominately dark-haired and olive-toned. And the former, his fitness and relative youth, was helpful on this operation because the subject of his surveillance was what was known, in Dominic Caruso’s line of work, as a hard target. Mustafa el Daboussi, the silver-haired fifty-eight-year-old man with the two musclemen serving as his bodyguards, was the focus of Dom’s mission in Cairo, and Mustafa el Daboussi was a terrorist.
And, Dominic did not need to be reminded, terrorists did not often make it fifty-eight years on this earth by being oblivious to men following them. El Daboussi knew every countersurveillance trick in the book, he knew these streets like the back of his hand, and he had friends here in the government and the police and the intelligence agencies.
A hard target, indeed.
For Caruso’s part, he wasn’t exactly a debutant at this game himself. Dom had been tailing some scumbag or another for most of the past decade. He’d spent several years as a special agent in the FBI before being recruited into The Campus along with his twin brother, Brian. Brian had been killed the year before on a Campus black op in Libya. Dom had been there, he’d held his brother in his arms as he died, and then Dominic returned to The Campus, hell-bent on doing the hard, dangerous work that he believed in.
Dom stepped around a young man selling tea from a large jug hanging by a leather strap from his neck, and he picked up the pace, anxious to get to the next decision point for his target: a four-way intersection some hundred yards to the south.
Back in the alleyway, Caruso’s partner, Sam Driscoll, followed the three men through the winding passageways, careful to keep his distance. Sam had decided that if he lost contact with his target, so be it; Dom Caruso was making his way forward to a choke point ahead. If el Daboussi disappeared between Sam’s and Dom’s positions they would look for him, but if they lost him today they would pick him up later, back at his rented house. It was better, it had been determined by the two Americans, to chance losing the target rather than to press their luck and run the risk of compromising themselves to their target or his protection detail.